This is an image from a
set of 8 extra-illustrated volumes of a tour in Wales by Thomas Pennant
(1726-1798) that chronicle the three journeys he made through Wales between
1773 and 1776. These volumes are unique because they were compiled for
Pennant's own library at Downing. This edition was produced in 1781. The
volumes include a number of original drawings by Moses Griffiths, Ingleby
and other well known artists of the period. Thomas Pennant (1726-1798)

Edward Kelly prophet or seer to Dr Dee

An 18th century engraving of Edward Kelley

Born 1 August
1555, Worcester, England

Died 1 November 1597 (aged 42) Most, Bohemia

Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward
Talbot (1 August 1555 – 25 November 1597), was an ambiguous figure in
English Renaissance occultism and self-declared Spirit Medium who worked
with John Dee in his magical investigations. Besides the professed ability
to summon spirits or angels in a ‘shew-stone’ or mirror, which John Dee so
valued, Kelley also claimed to possess the secret of transmuting base metals
into gold, the goal of alchemy, as well as the supposed Philosopher's Stone
itself.

Legends began to surround Kelley shortly after his
death. His flamboyant biography, his relationships with Queen Elizabeth I's
royal magus Sir John Dee and the Emperor Rudolf II, his supposed ability to
communicate with angels, and his possession of certain alchemical powders,
have led to his relative notoriety among historians: this has made him
(along with the German Faustus and Sir John Dee himself) one source for the
folklore image of the alchemist-Medium-charlatan.

Much of Kelley’s early life is obscure. He claimed
descent from the family of Ui Maine in Ireland. He was born in Worcester on
1 August 1555, at 4 P.M. according to a horoscope that John Dee drew up
(based on notes Dee kept in his almanac/diary). His sister Elizabeth was
born in 1558, and he had a brother Thomas who later joined him in Dee's
household. However, much of Kelley's life before meeting John Dee is not
known. He may have studied at Oxford under the name of Talbot; whether or
not he attended university, Kelly was educated and knew Latin and possibly
some Greek by the time he met Dee.

Anthony a Wood records in Athenae Oxoniensis that
Kelley, ‘being about 17 years of age, at which time he attained to a
competency of Grammar learning at Worcester and elsewhere, was sent to
Oxford, but to what house I cannot tell. However, I have been informed by an
ancient Bachelor of Divinity who in his younger years had been an Amanuensis
to Mr Thomas Allen of Gloucester-hall, that he (Kelly) had spent some time
in that House; whereupon I, recurring to the matriculation, could not find
the name Kelly, only Talbot of Ireland, three of which name were students
there in 1573, 74, &c... This relation being somewhat dubiously delivered to
me, I must tell you that Kelly having an unsettled mind, left Oxford
abruptly, without being entitled into the matricula.’ According to some
accounts, Kelley was pilloried in Lancaster for forgery or counterfeiting.
Both his ears were supposedly cropped, a common punishment during the Tudor
Dynasty. He usually wore a cap on his head, and it was thought this was to
hide his lack of ears. John Weever says, ‘Kelly (otherwise called Talbot)
that famous English alchemist of our times, who flying out of his own
country (after he had lost both his ears at Lancaster) was entertained with
Rudolf the second, and last of that Christian name, Emperor of Germany.’
Some accounts say that he first
worked as an apothecary's apprentice: some say he worked as a notary in
London.

With Dee in England

Kelley approached John Dee in 1582. Dee had already
been trying to contact angels with the help of a scryer, or crystal-gazer,
but he had not been successful. Kelley professed the ability to do so, and
impressed Dee with his first trial. Kelley became Dee's regular scryer or
Medium. Dee and Kelley devoted huge amounts of time and energy to these
‘spiritual conferences’. From 1582 to 1589, Kelley's life was closely tied
to Dee's. In those seven years, they conducted conferences or seances,
including ‘prayers for enlightenment... in the spirit of Dee's ecumenical
hopes that alchemy and angelic knowledge would heal the rift of
Christendom’. Dee also believed that
the angels held knowledge that would aid the English in their discoveries of
new and uncharted lands on Earth.

Kelley married a widow, Jane (or Joanna) Cooper of
Chipping Norton (1563–1606). He helped educate her two children: the girl,
future poet Westonia, later described him as a 'kind stepfather' and noted
how he took her in after the deaths of her two grandmothers. Kelley had also
hired a Latin tutor for her, named John Hammond (Johannes Hammonius in
Latin).

About a year after entering into Dee's service,
Kelley appeared with an alchemical book (The Book of Dunstan) and a quantity
of a red powder which, Kelley claimed, he and a certain John Blokley had
been led to by a ‘spiritual creature’ at Northwick Hill. (Accounts of
Kelley's finding the book and the powder in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey
were first published by Elias Ashmole, but are contradicted by Dee's
diaries.) With the powder (whose secret was presumably hidden in the book)
Kelley believed he could prepare a red ‘tincture’ which would allow him to
transmute base metals into gold. He reportedly demonstrated its power a few
times over the years, including in Bohemia (present Czech Republic) where he
and Dee resided for many years.

With Dee on the Continent

In 1583, Dee became acquainted with Prince Albert
Łaski, a Polish nobleman interested in alchemy. In September of that year,
Dee, Kelley, and their families left England with Łaski for the Continent.
Dee sought the patronage of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague and King Stefan of
Poland in Kraków; Dee apparently failed to impress either monarch enough to
earn a permanent station. Dee and Kelley lived a nomadic life in Central
Europe, meanwhile continuing their spiritual conferences. While Kelley was
apparently more interested in alchemy than in scrying, Dee seemed more
interested in making contact with the angels. Kelley's supposed value was as
a medium, as only he was able to understand and scribe their language.
According to those close to Dee (particularly his son Arthur) there was no
little tension between the two men and their families as they journeyed
through Europe. Some claim that ‘Dee seems to have driven Kelly to the brink
of insanity, forcing him to perform long scrying sessions on a nearly daily
basis’.

Kelley and Dee's involvement in necromancy
eventually caught the attention of the Catholic Church, and on 27 March 1587
they were required to defend themselves in a hearing with the papal nuncio,
Germanico Malaspina, bishop of San Severo. Dee handled the interview with
tact, but Kelley is said to have infuriated the nuncio by stating that one
of the problems with the Catholic Church is the ‘poor conduct of many of the
priests.’ The nuncio noted in a letter that he was tempted to toss Kelley
out of the window (defenestration was a somewhat common tradition in Prague
at the time).

In 1586, Kelley and Dee found the patronage of the
wealthy Bohemian Lord William of Rosenberg, a senior official from a
powerful family who also shared Kelley and Dee's alchemical interests and is
known to have participated in spiritual sessions with the two men. Kelley
and Dee settled in the town of Trebon and continued their research there (in
Dee's journal, he states ‘Oct. 26th, Mr. Edward Kelly cam to Trebona from
Prage’), and according to Dee's diary it was during this time that Kelley is
said to have performed his first alchemical transmutation (on 19 December
1586). Kelley's skilled draughtsmanship is evident in the notes taken by Dee
during certain séances (these notes are available in Dee's Book of Enoch).
These notes show Kelley's initial commitment to the alchemists' mutual goal.
However, he soon began to waver and expressed a desire to stop. Dee insisted
that they continue. In 1587, possibly as an act to sever the sessions,
Kelley revealed to Dee that the angels (namely a Spirit ‘Madimi’) had
ordered them to share everything they had, including their wives. Dee,
anguished by the ‘order’ of the angels, subsequently broke off the spiritual
conferences. He did, however, share his wife. This ‘cross-matching’ occurred
on 22 May 1587 and is noted in John Dee's diary: ‘May 22nd, Mistris Kelly
received the sacrament, and to me and my wife gave her hand in charity; and
we rushed not from her.’ Nine months later, on 28 February, Dee's wife Jane
gave birth to a son, Theodorus Trebonianus Dee. Although there may have been
speculation among the families that the child was actually Kelley's, he was
raised as Dee's son (references to the child's communion are present in
Dee's diary); the ‘cross-matching’ incident remained a secret (as did many
of their activities) until after the post-mortem publication of Dee's
diaries; there was no controversy at the time.

Though it seems the two shared an intimate and often
cooperative partnership, it was often characterised as ‘quarrelsome’ and
‘tense’ by contemporaries and historians. Also they were clearly involved in
activities that could be seen as heretical to the Catholic Church of the
time, so a certain amount of tact and secrecy was required. Kelly left Dee
at Trebon in 1589, possibly to join the emperor's court at Prague. Dee
returned to England. They did not see each other again.

Apogee and fall

By 1590 Kelley was living an opulent lifestyle in
Europe, enjoying the patronage of nobility: he received several estates and
large sums of money from Rozmberk. Meanwhile, he continued his alchemical
experiments until he had convinced Rudolph II that he was ready to start
producing gold, the purpose of his work. Rudolf knighted him Sir Edward
Kelley of Imany and New Luben on 23 February 1590 (but it is possible that
this happened in 1589). In May 1591, Rudolf had Kelley arrested and
imprisoned in the Krivoklat Castle outside Prague, supposedly for killing an
official named Jiri Hunkler in a duel; it is possible that he also did not
want Kelley to escape before he had actually produced any gold. In 1595,
Kelly agreed to co-operate and return to his alchemical work; he was
released and restored to his former status. When he failed to produce any
gold, he was again imprisoned, this time in Hnevín Castle in Most. His wife
and stepdaughter attempted to hire an imperial counselor who might free
Kelley from imprisonment, but he died a prisoner in late 1597/early 1598 of
injuries received while attempting to escape.[6] In 1674, Sir Thomas Browne,
an acquaintance of John Dee's son Arthur Dee, in correspondence to Elias
Ashmole, stated that ‘Arthur Dee said also that Kelley dealt not justly by
his father, and that afterwards imprisoned by the Emperor in a castle, from
whence attempting an escape down the wall, he fell and broke his leg and was
imprisoned again.’

A few of Kelley's writings are extant today,
including two alchemical verse treatises in English, and three other
treatises, which he dedicated to Rudolph II from prison. They were entitled
Tractatus duo egregii de lapide philosophorum una cum theatro astronomiae
(1676). The treatises have been translated as The Alchemical Writings of
Edward Kelley (1893).

The Enochian language

Kelley's ‘angels’ communicated to him/them in a
special ‘angelic’ language called Enochian. Some modern cryptographers argue
that Kelley invented it (see for example the introduction to The Complete
Enochian Dictionary by Donald Laycock). Some claim that this was all a
farce, but are not clear whether Dee was a victim or an accomplice. Because
of this precedent, and of a dubious connection between the Voynich
Manuscript and John Dee (through Roger Bacon), Kelley has been suspected of
having fabricated that book too, to swindle Rudolf. (In his exceptional book
‘The Elizabethans’ A.N. Wilson dismisses Edward Kelley as a ‘spurious
wizard’ and gives him no further mention.)

The angelic language was supposedly dictated by
angels whom Kelley claimed to see within a crystal ball or mirror. (Dee
experimented in optics, so these tools were always handy). The angels were
said to tap out letters on a complicated table, something like a crossword
puzzle but with all the cells filled in. The first third were tapped out
with each angelic word backwards; the following two-thirds with each word
forwards. There are no significant errors or discrepancies in word usage
between the first and following parts. The English translations were not
tapped out but, according to Kelley, appeared on little strips of paper
coming out of the angels' mouths.

The angelic word telocvovim is glossed as ‘he who
has fallen’, but it is actually a Germanic-like combination of two other
angelic words: teloch (glossed as ‘death’) and vovin (glossed as ‘dragon’).
Thus ‘he who has fallen’ would be literally translated as ‘death dragon’,
both rather obvious references to Lucifer. Neither Kelley nor Dee mentions
this in their writings.

One argument against Kelley's fabrication of angelic
language is that the English translations are in a very different style of
writing to that of Kelley's own work. This raises the possibility that
Kelley actually plagiarised material from a different source. However, no
likely source material has ever surfaced.

Dee considered the dictation of angelic material
highly important for three reasons. First, Dee believed the angelic
represented a documentable case of true glossolalia, thereby ‘proving’ that
Kelley was actually speaking with angels and not from his imagination.
Second, the angels claimed that their language was actually the original
prototype of Hebrew: the language with which God spoke to Adam, and thus the
first human word. Third, the angelic material takes the form of a set of
conjurations that would summon an extremely powerful set of angelic beings
who would reveal many secrets to those who sought them, especially the key
to the philosopher's stone, to god-like wisdom, and eternal life.

References in fiction, film and music.

Both Dee and Kelley are referred to in the classic
Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin.

Gustav Meyrink's 1927 novel The Angel of the West
Window describes John Dee's and Edward Kelley's astrological and mystical
experience.

In the 1951 Czech film The Emperor and the Golem,
Edward Kelley is a fake occultist and conspirator.

Both Dee and Kelley appear as characters in Episode
Four of the 1973 BBC/Masterpiece Theatre miniseries Elizabeth R. Kelley
offers Elizabeth his prophecies about the death of a prominent person (which
turns out to be Queen Mary of Scotland) and harangues one of the
conspirators against Elizabeth, hinting that he has foreseen the plot to
assassinate her, finally observing the conspirator's execution for treason
with a wry smile.

Dee and Kelley are discussed in the Hammer House of
Horror episode Guardian of the Abyss (1980).

The 1980 novel Zivot
alchymistuv (The Life of an Alchemist) by the Czech author Václav Kaplicky
describes Edward Kelley's life.

In the 1987 novel The Solitudes and its 1994 sequel
Love and Sleep by John Crowley, details Edward Kelley meeting with
renaissance magician John Dee and their subsequent travels in Europe. The
third of Crowley's Aegypt sequence, Daemonomania, sets out the parting of
Dee and Kelley, outlining Kelley's death in Bohemia.

In Patricia Wrede's 1989 novel Snow White and Rose
Red, Kelley and John Dee trap a faerie spirit in a crystal, and Kelley is
shown to be experimenting in alchemy.

Kelley appears in Peter Ackroyd's 1993 novel The
House of Dr Dee. In addition to the story narrated by John Dee himself,
which features Kelley as an important character, the novel also features a
second (entirely fictional) story narrated by Matthew Palmer, who inherits
Dee's mysterious residence in the 1990s. Ackroyd's novel fictitiously places
the house in the Clerkenwell section of London rather than at Mortlake --
reinforcing many of the novel's themes (radicalism; sacred London; Dee as
'Cockney visionary') but inaccurately representing actual events from
Kelley's association with Dee.

Edward Kelley figures prominently in the 2000 novel
School of the Night, which is part of the Elizabethan mystery series by
Judith Cook, The Casebook of Dr Simon Forman--Elizabethan doctor and solver
of mysteries. John Dee is also mentioned, but does not appear as a
character.

Edward Kelley is a minor character in Harry
Turtledove's 2002 alternate history novel, Ruled Britannia, which is set in
London a decade after its conquest by the Spanish Armada. Kelley is
convicted of alchemy (with the apparent intention of financing Protestant
rebels) and is burned in an auto-da-fe of the newly constituted English
Inquisition in the first chapter. His desperate last call for help to
witness William Shakespeare (the main character) switches the Spanish
occupiers' attention to him.

In Brian Stableford's science fiction story, ‘The
Philosopher's Stone’, published in the July 2008 issue of Asimov's Science
Fiction, Kelley and Dee appear in a fictionalised version of their meeting
and beginning collaboration.

In the 2009 novel Vampire a Go-Go by Victor Gischler,
Edward Kelley is the narrator and one of the main characters, with John Dee
in Prague.

The 2010 play Rudolf II, by Edward Einhorn, features
Kelley's stepdaughter Elizabeth Jane Weston (poet known as Westonia) and
details some of Rudolf's relationship with Kelley.

In the film Angel Heart, Krusemark gives the
pseudonym Edward Kelly when he removes Johnny Favorite from the hospital.

The 2010 play Burn Your Bookes by Richard Byrne
traces the rise and fall of Kelley as an alchemist through his relationships
with John Dee and Elizabeth Jane Weston.

The heavy metal band Iron Maiden recorded the song
‘The Alchemist’, from their 2010 album The Final Frontier, about John Dee
and Kelley.

The characters in the Robin Wasserman novel The Book
of Blood and Shadow search for a miraculous machine purportedly created by
Kelley, and built by his stepdaughter.

Both Dee and Kelley are referred to in the book
Shadow of Night (2012) by Deborah Harkness.

Kelley and John Dee both appear as central
characters in novel Prophecy (2011) from the Giordano Bruno series by S.J.
Parris